Here is the Bible, a 1740 edition of Martin Luther’s translation from the 1500’s. It is written in Hebrew, Greek, and German. Here is the family Bible, not my family’s, but from a member of a church where they would not have room for it in the apartment to which they were moving, but they did not want to throw it out. People do not like to discard Bibles. It has beautiful leatherwork on the cover and wonderful illustrations.

Here is the Polyglott Bible from the 1840’s. Originally, the Polyglott Bible contained several languages side-by-side for comparison, ergo, “Poly-glott;” but by this time they had it done only in the English translation. That kind of defeats the purpose of a polyglott Bible, reducing it to one language. But I really like the little leather clasp designed into the cover for easy transport in one’s saddlebag.

Here is my mother’s Bible, the King James Version first disseminated in 1611. It is the version that dominated in the English-speaking world for four and a half centuries and still is beloved for its elegant Elizabethan English. Someone was quoted as saying, though it is so good that it probably is apocryphal, “If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!”

That was in resistance to the Revised Standard Version that primarily was a product of American scholars in the early 1950’s. And here is the Bible that I carry in my briefcase, the New Revised Standard Version. As we learn more about biblical languages and customs our translations become more accurate.

So, here is a stack of Bibles. What is the saying, “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles”? Here is the stack, though only one Bible is sufficient for vow-making.

What we have in the Bible is a library of 66 books divided into Old and New Testaments, the Hebrew scripture and the Christian scripture. There are no original copies of any of the texts, though maybe scraps have been found. There is no first-ever copy of the psalms; there does not exist an original of the gospel that Matthew wrote. We have a translation handed down over the centuries through the languages. So, when we read Holy Scripture in our worship services we end by declaring, “The Word of God for the people of God,” but we do not say “the words of God.”

We do not know exactly how or what God communicated to the ones whose writings we now have, we only can believe that the writers were inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, the breath of God. That is what “inspire” means. It is from the Latin word “to breathe.”

If that is our understanding, that in the Bible we have the inspired Word of God, then how do we read it? Well, we must seek the same inspiration as we engage the text. Just to read it word for word, literally with no curiosity about what God might have us understand, is deadly. That is the assertion of Charles Wesley, the great Methodist poet, in a poem I love for its toughness and from which I have drawn the title of today’s sermon, “The Spirit Saves, the Letter Kills.” Here are the beginning two stanzas of the poem:

Whether the Word be preached or read,
      no saving benefit I gain
      from empty sounds or letters dead;
      unprofitable all and vain,
      unless by faith thy word I hear
      and see its heavenly character.
      Unmixed with faith, Scripture gives
      no comfort, life, or light to see,
      but me in darker darkness leaves,
      implunged in deeper misery,
      overwhelmed with nature’s sorest ills.
      The Spirit saves, the letter kills. (Hymnal #595)

There was a bumper sticker almost forty years ago that I resented so much that it still makes me angry when I think about it. It said, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” I wanted to drive around with another bumper sticker that shouted, “The Devil can quote scripture for his own cause!” Shakespeare. The Spirit saves, the letter kills.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement within Anglicanism and Charles’ older brother, insisted that Methodists read the Bible in a context that opens up our understanding to the letters on the page. He called himself a man of one book but, in fact, he was one of the best-read citizens of his century -- the Greek philosophers, the Early Church theologians, the ethical writings of the Continent, and scientific treatises of his own British Empire. But for him, the Bible was his primary source for understanding God’s world and his place in it.

He writes, “God hath condescended to teach the way (to heaven); . . . He hath written it down in a Book. O give me that Book! . . . Let me be HOMO UNIUS LIBRI (a man of one book). . . . In (God’s) presence I open, I read His Book; for this end, to find the way to heaven. Is there a doubt concerning what I read? Does anything appear dark and intricate?” If so, Wesley writes, he prays to God for inspired understanding. “I then search therein, with all the attention of which my mind is capable. If any doubt remains I consult those who are experienced in the things of God; and then the writings whereby, being dead, they yet speak. And what I thus learn, that I teach.”

Do you hear his method of biblical interpretation? He reads the text, prays for God’s Spirit to open up his mind to its meaning. He thinks, he reasons. Then, he talks to others to learn from their experience of how they understand God. And still more, he turns to his library of scholars, most now long having died, to read the tradition’s consensus on the scripture in question.

He starts with the scripture; that is primary. But he also uses reason, relies on experience, and culls from the tradition. Today in our United Methodist Church we talk about a biblical faith this is revealed in scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in experience, and confirmed by reason. That is a long way from “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” A biblical faith that is revealed in scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified by experience, and confirmed by reason. “The Spirit saves, the letter kills.”

For centuries Christians used the letter of the scriptural law to justify human slavery. It is there in the Bible, one person owning and ruling over another. There are instructions on how to treat a slave kindly, but no outright condemnation of it, even by the apostle Paul. And yet, Paul is attributed as insisting that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female in Jesus Christ, but that we are one.(Gal. 3:28) And he need not have stopped there: neither rich nor poor, gay nor straight, conservative nor liberal. We are all one in the love of Christ. So, even within the Bible itself from the same author there are contradictory emphases, more humane ones that tend to subvert the more punishing ones.

John Wesley hated slavery. He saw the slave ships sail from Bristol to America. He saw the money the owners and traders were making. He called American slavery the most “inexecrable villainy” imaginable, and early Methodism was integrated. Some of the earliest Methodist meetings in the American colonies were black and white, slave and free. But after Wesley died in 1791 and once the slave economy took hold of the American financial structure, our church caved in. It is a shameful act for which we continually, and even today, must seek God’s forgiveness and strive for the equality in Jesus Christ that God demands.

In the 1840’s the Methodist Church in America divided north and south; it already has segregated black and white. It further splintered with Wesleyan Methodists and Free Methodists, AME, AME Zion, and CME. Really it was not until 1968 that we regained some sense of reunification in the main body of Methodism, and it was a struggle. Go upstairs and look at our crucifixion sculpture and look at that distressed, truncated, African-American Jesus hanging there. That is our church.

To overcome slavery as an explicit institution in our society it took a re-reading of the scripture to find the subversive truth imbedded in the prevailing opinion. It took a retrieval of our tradition to find those places, including the preaching and political action of John Wesley himself, to expand our self-understanding. But mostly, it took experience – erasing arbitrary boundaries so that we could live with one another, that opened us to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And, of course, reason. Slavery, and its toxic aftermath of racism, just does not make sense. It is irrational in the mind of God, and therefore, a grievous offense, a sin.

So, reading scripture with inspired understanding, using tradition, experience, and reason to offer the context of interpretation – Charles Wesley ends his poem, addressing this to Jesus,

Open mine eyes to see thy face,
      open my heart thyself to know.
      And then I through thy Word obtain
      sure present, and eternal gain.  

The best advice I can give is what Miriam Humble said to you last year. Miriam was a long-time member here at the Chicago Temple, and she experienced a very difficult death, losing many of her abilities and her independence. I visited her in her hospital room and asked her what she would like to say to us back at the church, expecting her to thank us for cards and prayers. Instead, she said, “Memorize your Bible verses. When you lie here in the dark at night and you are too blind to read, and too deaf to listen to the radio, and too weak to get out of bed, and too shaky to write a letter, and too grumpy to talk to the nurses, all you have is what you remember. And then, the Bible verses I learned as a little girl come back to me, and they encourage me, they comfort me. That is what I have left to hang onto. Tell the people to learn Bible verses by heart so that they always will have God’s Word with them.”

The Bible is not written on a tablet of stone in a museum or a papyrus scroll in a library. It is written upon the human heart for the human heart. Especially in this Lenten season may we open our hearts to be touched by the inspiration of God. The letter may kill, but the Spirit saves.

Amen.